The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (29 page)

Alice believed nothing could improve what was wrong with California’s miserable public
schools so radically as a vegetable garden, and if there was something of the temperance
crusader in her, walking through the slums asking why the men drank so much, Alice
didn’t let the thought trouble her for a moment. If a question about priorities was
raised—should schools that didn’t have funds for substitute teachers and classroom
supplies spend money on “sustainability education”?—Alice got a steely look in her
eye. “It can be done, it will be done, it’s going to happen, you’ll see.”

This was the start of her transformation from restaurateur to evangelist. It took
a couple of years to raise the money privately and get the official approval, the
personnel, and—hardest of all—the participation of the students. But once the Edible
Schoolyard got going, it was such a success that other cities around the country adopted
the idea. In 2001, Alice brought it to Yale, where her daughter was an entering freshman.
Four years later, Alice’s idea took root on the National Mall.

And when Barack Obama arrived at the White House, Alice immediately wrote to him:
“At this moment in time, you have a unique opportunity to set the tone for how our
nation should feed itself. The purity and wholesomeness of the Obama movement must
be accompanied by a parallel effort in food at the most visible and symbolic place
in America—the White House.” When Michelle Obama announced in May 2009 that there
would be a vegetable garden on the White House grounds, everyone regarded Alice as
its godmother.

In the sixties, most Americans ate more or less the same, bad things. Chicken à la
king with a wedge of iceberg lettuce was a popular dish, while fondue made its way
among the more daring. But in the new millennium, food divided Americans as rigidly
as just about everything else. Some people ate better, more carefully than ever, while
others got grossly overweight on processed foods. Some families, usually intact, educated,
prosperous ones, made a point of sitting down together to a locally sourced, mindfully
prepared dinner at home several nights a week. Others ate fast-food takeout together
in the car, if at all. Alice helped make food into a political cause, a matter of
social change and virtuous lifestyles, but in the age of Chez Panisse, food could
not help being about class. Her refusal to compromise her own standards led others
to turn her revolutionary spirit on its head.

For some Americans, the local, organic movement became a righteous retreat into an
ethic defined by consumer choices. The movement, and the moral pressure it brought
to bear in parts of society, declared: Whatever else we can’t achieve, we can always
purify our bodies. The evidence lay in the fanaticism of the choices. A mother wondered
aloud on a neighborhood Listserv whether it was right to let her little girl go on
being friends with another girl whose mother fed them hot dogs. This woman was sanitizing
herself and her daughter against contamination from a disorderly and dangerous society
in which the lives and bodies of the poor presented a harsh example. Alice hated the
word
elitist
, but these were elite choices, because a single mother working three jobs could never
have the time, money, and energy to bring home kale with the right pedigree, or share
Alice’s sublime faith in its beneficence.

Alice wanted to bring people to a better life, but she had trouble imagining that
the immediate comfort of a walking taco might be exactly what a twelve-year-old wanted.
When she heard the criticisms, she turned away, to the radishes and flowers. Anyone
who was passionate enough about organic strawberries, she believed, could afford to
buy them. “We make decisions every day about what we’re going to eat. And some people
want to buy Nike shoes—two pairs!—and other people want to eat Bronx grapes, and nourish
themselves. I pay a little extra, but this is what I want to do.”

TAMPA

Tampa was going to be America’s Next Great City. That was what the 1982 book
Megatrends
said—Tampa would be one of ten “new cities of great opportunity,” all of them in
the Sunbelt—and in 1985 the Chamber of Commerce decided to aim higher than the city’s
hedonistic motto from the seventies, which had been “Tampa: Where the good life gets
better every day,” and replaced it with “America’s Next Great City.” The words appeared
on billboards, bumper stickers, and T-shirts, and who could doubt that they would
prove true when Tampa had a new international airport, it had the 1984 Super Bowl,
it had the NFL Buccaneers, it had the eleven million square feet of the Westshore
business and shopping district, it had sunshine and beaches, and it was growing as
fast as anywhere in the country? Fifty million new people came to Florida every year,
and since the sunshine and beaches weren’t going anywhere, Tampa would continue to
grow, and by growing, become great.

It grew and grew. It grew in order to grow. It grew throughout the eighties, in good
economic times and bad, when pro-growth conservatives ran the Hillsborough County
Commission and when pro-planning progressives ran the county commission. It grew throughout
the nineties, when Tampa Bay got the NHL Lightning and the major league Devil Rays,
plus another Super Bowl. After the millennium it grew like gangbusters. Florida’s
governor, Jeb Bush, was a developer, so he understood all about growth, and the county
commission became majority Republican, with one or two votes safely in the pocket,
and maybe the pay, of the developers, the land use attorneys, the builders, and Ralph
Hughes. Hughes was a former boxer with a conviction for felony assault who, until
he died owing more than three hundred million dollars in taxes, owned a company, Cast-Crete,
that made all the precast concrete beams for all the doorways in all the subdivisions
that were going up all over Hillsborough County.

For it was really the county that grew. While the city of Tampa inched past three
hundred thousand people, Hillsborough County, with its vast tracts of unincorporated
farmland and ranchland and wetland, surged beyond a million. The selling point wasn’t
America’s Next Great City after all—Tampa was an old port with a defunct cigar industry,
a history of labor trouble, a high crime rate, and an uneasy mix of Latinos, Italians,
Anglos, and blacks. No, the growth was actually hostile to urban life. What it offered
was the American dream in a subdivision, the splendid isolation of a new homestead
an hour’s drive from downtown. A developer’s brochure promised thousands of square
feet “a comfortable distance from the higher prices, taxes, and congestion of big
city living. Come enjoy the home Tampa residents can only dream about.” That was the
ethos of the Sunbelt, and since the seventies it had made the Sunbelt the model for
the country’s future.

As long as more people came this year than last year, and next year than this year,
there would always be more houses to build, and more jobs in construction and real
estate and hospitality. Property values would continue to go up, and the state could
continue to do without an income tax, financing its budget with sales taxes and real
estate fees. To encourage more growth, friendly county commissioners would waive the
impact fees that were supposed to be assessed to the developers in order to help pay
for new roads and water lines. In the exurbs going up around Tampa Bay, property taxes
could remain low, with new schools and fire stations funded by bond issues floated
on the projection of future growth. So in a sense everyone was getting returns from
investments that would come in tomorrow, or next year.

A few local critics pointed out the strategy’s resemblance to a Ponzi scheme. But
everything kept growing and no one paid attention.

The growth machine cleared out the pine trees and palmettos and orange groves along
State Road 54 up in Pasco County. It cut down the mangroves on Apollo Beach and laid
asphalt over the strawberry farms around Plant City. Farther south down Interstate
75, in Lee County, the growth machine built a university on the wetlands near Fort
Myers (Senator Connie Mack put in a call to the Army Corps of Engineers), and it sold
quarter-acre lots on the installment plan between the drainage canals of Cape Coral.
Farmers and ranchers cashed out and suddenly, where there had been orchards or pastures
or swampland, developers put up instant communities—they were called “boomburgs”—and
christened them with names that evoked the ease of English manor life: Ashton Oaks,
Saddle Ridge Estates, the Hammocks at Kingsway (even the trailer parks had names like
Eastwood Estates). Overnight, it seemed, the growth machine paved empty fields of
wiregrass into straight flat suburban streets called Old Waverly Court, Rolling Greene
Drive, and Pumpkin Ridge Road, and along the curbs, driveways with small treeless
yards appeared, and two-story concrete block houses went up, with stucco walls painted
yellow or beige and a columned archway over the front door to lend an illusion of
elegance that would jack up the price. The developers promised recreation centers,
playgrounds, and lakes, and they sold the houses on spec for $230,000, unless you
got in six months later, when it might cost you $300,000—you were buying or you were
dying. Shopping malls and megachurches sprang up nearby, and the two-lane highways
got so crowded that they had to be widened.

No place was too remote or unpromising for development. Gibsonton was a little town
on the eastern side of Tampa Bay, where carnival freaks used to spend the winters—old
rural Florida, bait shops and shotgun shacks and Spanish moss hanging from live oaks.
A builder out of Miami called Lennar Homes wanted to bury a tropical fish farm in
Gibsonton under dirt and concrete and put up a new subdivision of 382 houses. There
were no nearby schools except in trailers, no shopping besides a Wal-Mart a few miles
away, and no jobs within a forty-five-minute drive. But it was growth, so the county
commission ignored the warnings of its own planners and gave Lennar every possible
break on impact fees and taxes, and in 2005 Carriage Pointe opened for business.

There were no town centers out among the subdivisions, no towns at all, no hills to
relieve the flatness, so that you never quite knew where you were without GPS, or
what time of day it was without a clock, since the bright tropical light hardly varied.
A landmark would be a four-way stoplight at the intersection of two eight-lane roads,
with a Publix in one corner, a Sam’s Club in the next, a Walgreen’s in the third,
and a Shell station in the fourth. There was a Town Center in Brandon, a vast unincorporated
boomburg of a hundred thousand souls, but it was the name of the biggest shopping
mall. Brandon’s main street was West Brandon Boulevard, or U.S. 60, and in the half
mile between stoplights, the shops passed by in an uninterrupted blur:
Einstein Bros Bagels Florida Car Wash State Farm Dairy Queen Express Lube Jesse’s
Steaks McDonald’s Five Star Paint Ball Aquarium Center Sunshine State Federal Credit
Union Mister Car Wash Weavers Tire
+
Automotive Wendy’s.

The growth machine became the employment agency. Other than minimum wage jobs at restaurants
and big-box stores, it was hard to find work outside the real estate industry. In
the hierarchy of the boom years, the poor were Mexican day laborers on construction
sites; the working class had jobs in the building trades; the lower middle class were
bank tellers; the middle class were real estate agents, title insurance agents, and
civil engineers; the upper middle class were land use attorneys and architects; and
the rich were developers.

Some of the buyers were refugees from Tampa, leaving the city behind on that promise
of a dream home in a place they’d never heard of called Country Walk. Most came from
out of state. But the area wasn’t Miami or Palm Beach, a destination for upscale snowbirds.
It was settled mainly by lower-middle-class people, many of whom followed the I-75
trail down from Ohio, Michigan, and other midwestern places that nurtured frugality
and prudence. Hillsborough and the neighboring counties became conservative, churchgoing
country, with antiabortion signs and prophecies of Judgment Day scattered among the
highway billboards advertising model homes and liposuction. But those older values
went soft in the flat light that stared down like a constant high noon.

There were the Luxes, Richard and Anita, from Michigan. Anita’s father had worked
in Ford’s River Rouge plant long enough to remember Henry Ford and Walter Reuther,
and Anita had a job with the city of Dearborn, until Richard’s architectural firm
asked him to start a new Florida office in the eighties. Anita brought her father’s
frugality to St. Petersburg and remained a coupon queen. But she went to work at Wachovia
Bank, which got heavily into subprime loans after acquiring World Savings, out of
California: the loans were called “Pick a Pay,” and the customers were invited to
design their own mortgages, choosing an interest rate and a payment plan. These loans
were squeezed into the spectacularly profitable juice that fueled the growth machine.

There was Jennifer Formosa, also from Michigan, but raised by her mother in Florida.
After high school she went to work as a bank teller in Cape Coral and married her
baby’s father, a local guy named Ron, who didn’t have a high school diploma but made
decent money pouring concrete foundations. Ron and Jennifer took out a $110,000 mortgage
and built a three-bedroom house, refinanced to pay their bills, took out an equity
line to put on a new roof, then refinanced again to pay off their cars, put in the
patio, buy a boat, and blow the rest on cruises and trips with the kids to Disney
World.

There was Bunny—“just Bunny”—who grew up on Utopia Parkway in Queens, New York, then
chased the sun and the good life to Hawaii, Arizona, and West Palm Beach, before ending
up in a subdivision called Twin Lakes on State Road 54 in Pasco County, where she
bought for $114,000, then watched her house go up to $280,000 in six years.